


Where Worlds Collide

by beekeepercain



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F, Fairies, Femslash February, Fluff, Roleplay, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-08
Updated: 2013-02-08
Packaged: 2017-11-28 15:30:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/675979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beekeepercain/pseuds/beekeepercain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faced with hardship, Charlie's favoured option has often been to disappear, but there are things you can't escape. One of them is love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where Worlds Collide

**Author's Note:**

> THIS PAIRING UNF. CHARLIE UNF. LOVE. OK? Ok. Good.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Dean settled back in his café chair, pulled a knee up against his chest and wrapped his arms around it. He examined Charlie's face, and the woman looked back at him, her expression both judgmental and anxious. Summer sunlight warmed the table she'd chosen for them, as it was by the window - the sun didn't hit directly onto it, as it was still above the roof somewhere towards the opposite wall, but the day was hot enough for that to matter only very little. Behind them a customer walked in or out every couple minutes. Nobody was paying attention to them: they looked perfectly normal, probably coming across as either family or a couple who'd broken up and were trying to get back in contact. There was a distance between them, an electrified, silent tension that was growing by the minute until Dean finally raised brows dismissively and grabbed his sandwich.  
Charlie watched him eat, and that did nothing to make him feel more at ease.

"So," he started with his mouth full of grilled chicken with barbeque sauce and all the greens he didn't even taste from the rest, "I don't think you called me in to feel uncomfortable, so spit it out, will you?"

The faintest hint of a blush gathering on the woman's cheeks surprised Dean. He opened his mouth to say something witty, but no words came out, so he resorted to a baffled grin and bit into his bread again.

"I should have known," Charlie sighed, giving him a glare that was about as scary as they came, "You're still a dick. Never mind, I can probably handle it alone, no problem, after all what a newb like you could -"

"A what?" Dean asked.

"Whatever."  
Charlie picked up her coat and stood up to leave, but Dean knew she wasn't going anywhere. To please her, however, he swallowed the bread and flashed an apologetic grimace.  
"Okay! Okay, fine. Come on, sit back down and tell me, I'll do what I can. I mean, I drove for an hour to get here and ditched Sam on a case because you said you really need me here, and I'd like to know why before I head back."

Slowly, Charlie sat back down and eyed him suspiciously.  
"You ditched Sam on a case? Wow. Sure you aren't harboring a crush on me, 007?"

Dean chuckled.  
"Absolutely positive about that. Don't want to ruin any girl-on-girl action, you know?"

"I _knew_ it. You just want in."

"Oh, shut it, I wouldn't be a dick like that, would I?"  
They stared at one another for a moment before Charlie let out a submitting sigh and started gathering herself for whatever she'd called him over for. She nearly began, but backed off from it, brought up her cup of chocolate mocha and sipped it, made a face and seemed to try again.  
No voice left her.  
Dean grinned.  
"C'mon, it can't be that bad."

"No," Charlie uttered, "No. The bad thing is you. I know why I called you up and not Sam, but I'm having second thoughts here. You really can't help me, can you?"  
Dean raised his brows and spread his hands resignedly.  
"The hell would I know if you never tell me what I'm supposed to do? Girl, I'm not a girl. I don't read minds, sorry."  
Charlie rolled her eyes.  
"Yeah, I'm aware. Look, no, listen. I called you because I feel better talking about this stuff with you. You sort of get me, right? Girls and so on. You get liking girls. And anyway. I've been trying _so hard_ but I don't know where to start. I need to find - I really _need_ to find - Gilda."

Dean was taken aback. He held his coffee some five inches above the table, having just almost drank out of the cup before forgetting everything as Charlie spoke. When the younger was finished, Dean finally raised the cup up to his lips and drank, although he was hardly concentrated on that, and didn't even taste the coffee.  
"So - uh - I'm here because Sam's... gay, is that what you're saying?"

"No," Charlie sighed frustratedly, "Sam's borderline asexual, I'd feel creepy if I brought this up with him. That's not my point. Can you or can you not help me?"  
  
Dean stretched his neck, laid the cup back on the table and took a moment to look out the window. He watched the people pass by, carrying shopping bags and dogs in purses and leashes with dogs on the other end and then more bags and then nothing. Dust swirled at their feet. Most shoes were new, barely worn - it was an expensive area. Only people with money to buy new shoes every other week came there to shop. Dean wondered if any of them had worked a day in their lives, considering they weren't working now either, but still had all the time in the world to buy all that expensive crap they carried, like gift bags from the perfume stores or paper bags from designer stores.  
They made him feel uneasy, more so than the prices of his coffee and sandwich had.  
"Probably," he finally said and turned back to look at Charlie, whose face lit up the same moment even if she didn't dare to flash a smile just yet.

Dean reached for his bag and pulled out a notebook.  
"We're going to need Sam, though, I have close to nothing on fairies. I mean, I know how to kill one, but since we're not after Gilda to kill her, well, Sam's pretty much the only option."

"It's okay," Charlie said immediately, leaning forwards, "I just didn't want to explain this _to_ him, that's all."

For a moment, Dean hovered the pen above the blank page he'd turned on the notebook. Then he grimaced.  
"Sam's not _that_ out of touch with reality," he chuckled and tapped the page, "I mean - he's a healthy guy, he has, err, well, yeah. Healthy needs. Don't ever make me say that again. So... what do we know about Gilda?"

 

*

Charlie shifted on her bed, eyes upon the laptop screen and the video playing on it. She hardly heard the dialogue, her fingers anxiously brushing through her red hair that felt dry and coarse from lack of care - she'd been too stressed and worn to give it any of the attention it would have needed to stay healthy. She'd ignored her email, skipped an important LARP event, and basically decided to bury herself as far deep underground as possible until she'd hear something, anything at all, from the Winchesters. She'd never wanted to hear from them this badly before. Quite the exact opposite, in fact, as she'd never really wanted to hear from them again before the whole thing with Gilda had happened.  
For a while afterwards, she'd felt confident she could forget the fairy, but the memory of her had grown like cancer inside her. At first, it had been that wonderful, warm balloon, but soon, it had started eating her alive. She'd lost her appetite, then her will to live. Now she was just miserable and obsessed.

Her hand made a dive for some chips and she stuffed them in her mouth without tasting them. Somebody died onscreen. It was a very dramatic death, so the character had probably been important. She couldn't remember seeing him before.  
With that realisation, she finally closed the window and gave up. No amount of bad scifi movies would make her feel alive again. And neither would the chips. They'd only make her fat - and fast - if she'd exercise as infrequently as she had recently done. Charlie was a couch potato by nature, she couldn't deny that, but Charlie wasn't elbow-deep in chips either. Carrie, on the other hand, had somehow manage to inject her personality with both the desire for greasy salty snacks and the will to excercise. She'd perfected her skills with the Queen's sword, and quite frankly there weren't many things she enjoyed as much recently as she enjoyed a good sword fight, perhaps with Aidan the Skillful, even if the guy was an asshole off game. On top of that, Carrie had found the joys of jogging with epic music playing from her headphones. It didn't matter if it was the Star Wars soundtracks on loop or some of the guilty pleasures her ears had secretly grown fond of, just the feel of running as the sun was setting and the warm summer winds pushed their cool, long, inhuman fingers caressingly into her hair was what did the trick for her. She felt like a hero then, just like when she was the Queen, and not this pitiful thing she was outside that false reality.

With another handful of chips, she frowned at what Dean had said during the Battle of the Kingdoms and all the awfulness that had taken place behind the scenes - that she was a hero, not in Moondoor and not in a fake movie playing in her head, but the real world, where she had helped the brothers in saving it.  
She'd never thought of it like that.  
She'd thought of it like _oh god I need to go and bury myself six feet under for at least a year and never push my head out of the ground again and dear lord the monsters are actually real, monsters are real, monsters are ---_ and everything else had been just unfortunate details lost in everything she did not want to ever think about again.

She found herself staring at her salty and spiced fingers disgustedly.  
Was this what she'd become?  
She was the only monster present in this house. Eating this crap despite having no desire for it at all, addicted to the high chewing and swallowing gave her. She wiped the hand on her jeans, ditched the bag and hopped up. She'd wash that nasty down with some water and then go out. She really needed to go out. But she wouldn't jog tonight - all those chips would give her a stomach knot if she did.  
Instead, she could maybe join up with the paper and pen RPG group gathering later in the evening. That might take her mind off the email that still had not come, and if the Winchesters would call her with news, she could go OOC at any point she wished. The paper and pen group wasn't into very hectic games, after all, and they never said no for a smoke break or some additional time to discuss the tactics of a fight.  
They also never grew tired about talking about their characters.

 

*

"Moooove iiiit," Gary prompted.  
"Wait," was the reply he got, "Shanta's not quite ready yet. She'll step back. Let Freodor handle that."  
"Freodor's on mana break, though. Still, like, for two full turns."  
"By Thor. Fine, Annabelle handles it."  
"Yes, sir, yes. Strikes with fireball from on top of the high rock. Who has the dice? Thanks. Let's see. Yeah, strike, don't think it went down though - nope, the gargoyle's still up."

Charlie gnawed on her lip and watched the game progress. Then it was her turn to do something. She creased her brows ever so slightly, her teeth letting go of the bit of skin she'd been tearing at and she cleared her throat.  
"Cassandra charges on for a strike at it. Dice? Thanks. I need the six-sided, too. It's enchanted. We agreed on the bonus last time. Good. Okay, here goes. Ugh - I think she stumbled, missed by like four inches, that's an awful throw. Gargoyle's still up... do I take damage?"

Gary rolled.  
"Yeah, sorry, Carrie. Cassandra suffers a blow, unarmed strike for... five. Didn't you have that - yeah, okay, so minus a hit point, that's good, you're still well off. Backing?"

"Backing."

"'kay."

The dice rolled, Charlie wasn't sure whose turn it was or who'd thrown the dice or if it was actually going to count for something, because just then, her pocket had started vibrating, and the feel had thrown her heartbeat off its rhythm. Her jaw dropped a little as she reached for the phone.  
"Guys off character, I need to take this, just a moment," she said in as normal tone as she could when her anxiety turned into full-blown panic at the sight of the fake name on the screen.

"Okay, break it - back in ten and if Carrie's not back by then, we'll assume Cassandra sprained her ankle and is off-game, you hear that, Carrie?"

Charlie was out the door by that time. She closed it carefully behind her back and fell against it as she held the phone up to her ear and breathed out as the line opened.  
"Whatd'yagot?" she breathed out.

"Um."  
It was Sam's voice - the line was full of other sounds and faint like they were underground, from which Charlie knew the phone was on speaker and they were somewhere way off the map.  
"Hey, Charlie, it's us," Dean spoke as if she hadn't already known that, "Listen, Sam's done well on this and we're pretty sure we have it here."  
"You need pen and paper, I'll give you the coordinates, tell us when you're ready," Sam instructed her.

Charlie swallowed thickly.  
"Okay, gimme a minute."  
Without waiting, she charged right back in the apartment, grabbed a pen from Andy and then her own notebook, and without saying a thank you or waiting for questions jogged back out and slammed the door closed behind her.  
She could feel the stares even behind the solid wall between herself and the RPG group.

 

*

Charlie parked her creaking, noisy car by the end of the grassy road and tried to calm herself down. She'd barely slept the whole night and by seven in the morning, she'd already been behind the wheel. The car was borrowed, a terrible box of rusted metal and spare parts, but as if by miracle it had survived the ten hour drive across the country.  
As she stood there, locking the car up just in case some local bear had carjacking tendencies, the quiet humming of the red cedar trees all around her was already making her fall in love with the place. When she straightened her back and lifted her backpack up her shoulders, she knew what Gilda had meant when she'd said the forest in their Moondoor game hadn't come close to the beauty of her home. This forest was as ancient as it was remote, and it spanned miles and miles in all directions. Charlie wasn't concerned with its size - she had a summoning spell, one she hoped she wouldn't have to use. She had a scenery in her mind, playing on a very uninvited loop, where Gilda was there waiting for her and they fall into a passionate embrace right away. The thought made the woman smile. She'd have to do a little looking and a little calling and maybe a ballet number on top of that, but she had hope that she'd never have to force - that Gilda would know she was there. That they shared... a connection, perhaps, or that she could understand the speech of the birds and the wild animals and all nature would bring them together once more.

"Gather yourself, woman," Charlie muttered as she laid her feet upon the worn trekking path she'd chosen for a starting point, "You're no princess. You're the knight who saved the princess. This is your kingdom now. Or half of it is, at least. Now you just need to find the lady and make her your queen."

She had a tent, a sleeping bag and lots of water, although she'd also marked down places on her map in case she'd need to refill. She had canned beans and a pack of chips and with each step, her reluctance to actually stay the night lessened. It was a beautiful forest, and the track she followed was clear and easy to walk on. The birds were singing and the slowly setting sun was turning the branches and leaves of the surrounding trees a shade of gold. She'd made sure from the Winchesters that the area had no record for potential supernatural activity - a part of her had already known it was safe, as if Gilda would let anything horrible make home in her forest, but hearing her guts were right about it was still a relief. There had been a bear attack five years earlier, but she'd make so much noise no bear would dare to come anywhere near her and if it did, she'd bribe it with chips while charging into the arms of her beloved, or at least that's how her more brave characters would have gone about the business. In truth, if she'd face a bear, she'd probably cry quietly in her tent, hidden deep inside her sleeping bag.

Now there was no sign of a bear, nor of any other creature for that matter, some birds excluded. There were few visible, but the chorus of chirping indicated the presence of hundreds all around Charlie as she walked onwards, sometimes obsessively glancing at her map and making sure she was still on the same track - the track that hadn't, for once, split, but continued straight as a single line for nearly fifty minutes. At that point, it finally did split into two. Charlie knelt by the crossroads and drew a cross in the middle.  
"Gilda, it's Charlie here," she said, speaking to the forest around her, "If you can hear me somehow, then... I don't really know where to go either. I hope here's fine. Okay."

She drew breath, her eyes closed, ears picking up all sounds around her. The forest was quiet, excluding the ever present choir of birds chattering. When she felt calm - or calmer, at the very least - she let her backpack fall on the ground and picked out a small bag of rose petals from the front pocket. It was dark brown velvet and had originally belonged to one of the Queen's companions, but Alicia had moved to attend a university half across the country, and the bag had stayed. It was perfect. Charlie loved it, it was like a movie prop, so perfect with the golden woven string with which it was tied shut. She dropped it on the X. The X wasn't relevant, she'd simply drawn it there for the sake of it, but now that the bag was there in the middle, it looked kind of cool.

"Hope you've been missing me, because - well - if this doesn't work and you don't come to me on your own, then I'm going to summon you, and if you didn't want to come, that'd be really, really, _really_ awkward for both of us."

She opened the bag and sprinkled the petals around her. When she was done, she lifted her gaze to the forest. The sun's rays warmed the spot she'd chosen, and the feel of the light upon her skin made Charlie feel a little more at ease.  
She glanced around her, feeling stupid already, but there was no other hiker in sight. Swallowing thickly, she closed her eyes once more to avoid that distraction, and spoke clearly to the wind passing her by.  
"With no ill intentions, I call upon the fairies of this forest, to come to me in peace. My conscience is clear and my heart is pure," _as if, but maybe_ this _time those both apply - for a moment_ , "as I call for one who named herself Gilda to me."

_Okay, this is really stupid._

But even if it was, Charlie found she had big troubles with opening her eyes. The command didn't quite make it all the way to the muscles controlling that action. Then, as her ears picked a sound of feet upon the path right in front of her, her eyes flew open and she jumped up, heart fluttering in her chest and cheeks suddenly hot and lips parted to let out the smallest of gasps.

For a moment, she thought she was dying when she saw the fairy in front of her. She was so beautiful with the sunlight in her hair, her lips bent to a warm smile.  
"You look exactly like Galadriel in sunlight," Charlie choked and slammed a hand on her mouth, too late to stop the words.  
Gilda let out a small, quiet laughter.  
"I was not expecting you," she said softly, "but I did hope we would meet again."

"You didn't call me, so I came to you. Your forest is beautiful, like you said."

Gilda closed her eyes for a moment, took a step closer and grabbed Charlie's hands in hers. She looked her in the eye and her smile grew until she looked like it was the happiest moment she'd ever experienced, the joy in her expression lighting up her eyes. Wind blew into her curly hair and brought some of it over her face. Charlie felt like she was made of melting chocolate, and her heart was still going crazy in her chest.  
"This is the place where our worlds collide," Gilda finally spoke, her voice full of emotion and almost breaking, "The image of my home on your realm. It is not quite the same, but it is close."

"Okay," Charlie said, not really sure what the fairy was talking.  
Then she smirked.  
"You know what I really want close to right here?"

Gilda tilted her head questioningly.

"Your lips."

They both smiled as their lips joined in a gentle kiss. Didn't take long for it to escalate.  
"Now that's what I'm talking about," Charlie muttered pleasedly into the kiss and stroked the fairy's cheek with the back of her palm, shivering as she pressed closer.


End file.
